Taylor’s main example is the experience of the death of the beloved. Drawing on the work of the French historian Philippe Ariès—as well as sociological studies of contemporary faith—Taylor emphasizes that the loss of loved ones is the experience that is hardest to bear in a secular age:
It is significant that the salient feature of death today, the major drama around it, is this separation of loved ones. Ariès has shown that it was not always so. In the late medieval and early modern ages, the great issue was the judgment soon to be faced by the person dying. And before that, the dead were in a sense still in a sort of community with the living. So that Ariès distinguishes the periods under the titles: “la mort de nous” [our death], “la mort de moi” [my death], and “la mort de toi” [your death]. Just because Hell has faded, but love relationships are central to the meaning of our lives, we live with the greatest anguish la mort de toi.21
Again, one may question the details of the historical account given here. The experience of your death was certainly vivid and deeply painful long before the advent of the modern age, as any reading of literary history from Homer onward will testify. Nevertheless, the important point is that the pain and anguish of losing the beloved are allowed to emerge with greater force in an explicitly secular age. The question is whether a religious notion of eternity is capable of addressing the experience of mourning and offering consolation. Taylor takes this for granted and laments the withdrawal of belief in eternal life. “There is a sense of void here, and of deep embarrassment,” Taylor claims, and he adduces the lack of belief in eternity as an explanation for why “we very often feel awkward at a funeral; don’t know what to say to the bereaved; are often tempted to avoid the issue if we can.”22 Moreover, he suggests that “even people who otherwise don’t practice have recourse to religious funerals” because “here at least is a language which fits the need for eternity, even if you’re not sure you believe all that.”23 The love for and resistance to letting go of the beloved would thus testify to a religious desire for eternity, since “love by its nature calls for eternity.”24
To understand the stakes of the argument, it is worth pausing to consider how Taylor articulates the relation between time and eternity. Taylor reduces the notion of “secular time” to a mere succession of moments that have no intrinsic connection with one another. In contrast, all forms of “gathering time”—of holding on to the past and projecting into the future—are for Taylor expressions of our “irrepressible craving for eternity.”25 While Taylor acknowledges that our forms of gathering time cannot attain the absolute fullness of eternity, he holds that such fullness is the goal. According to Taylor, eternity should not be understood as a timeless state of being but rather as the gathering of time into an instant. “God’s eternity,” Taylor claims, “does not abolish time, but gathers it into an instant.”26
Taylor’s distinction has been made by many Christian thinkers, but it is specious. There is no intelligible difference between abolishing time and gathering time into an instant. If time is gathered into an instant there is no time, since the instant does not give way to the future and become past. Rather, everything is present and there is no time for anything to happen, since everything that can possibly happen is already contained in the eternal now. As Taylor himself underscores, in God’s eternity “all times are present to him, and he holds them in his extended simultaneity. His now contains all time.”27 Such an eternal now cannot “gather” time but eliminates any sense of time. There is no analogy between the eternal presence of God and our attempts to hold on to the time of our lives. Far from gathering our experiences and allowing us to live on, an eternal now would deprive us of a past and a future. Our lifetime would be reduced to an instant and we would have no life to live.28
To distinguish between eternity and living on is therefore decisive. When we wish that the lives of those whom we love will last, we do not wish for them to be eternal but for their lives to continue. Likewise, when we “gather time” into a meaningful network of relations, we are not “craving for eternity.” Taylor’s argument is based on a conflation, which makes it seem as though we aspire to a religious form of eternity when we aspire to secular forms of living on. The secular experience of time cannot be reduced to a series of discrete moments. On the contrary, any experience of time depends on retaining the past and projecting into the future. This is the minimal form of living on, which is the condition for all forms of “gathering time.” The form of living on makes it possible to bind the past to the future—to make our lives last and hold together beyond the moment—but it cannot even in principle reduce time to the simultaneity of an eternal present. On the contrary, to live on is to maintain the relation to a past that is no longer and the relation to a future that is not yet. The form of living on enables us to sustain a commitment—to safeguard what we love and bind together what matters to us—but it also marks the inherent fragility of the binding activity.
Furthermore, the fragility of any bond of love is an intrinsic part of why it matters that we keep faith with our love and bind our lives together. As is clear from Taylor’s own account, love consists in sustaining a relation that can be lost and thereby expresses a commitment to living on rather than to eternity. “A deep love,” Taylor points out, “already exists against the vicissitudes of life, tying together past and present in spite of the disruptions and dispersals of quarrels, distractions, misunderstandings, resentments.”29 To love one another is to be devoted to living on and flourishing together despite the forces that pull us apart. Indeed, the temporality of living on is at work in the very experience of fulfillment. Even the greatest moments of happiness in love—gathering and deepening the qualitative experience of a shared life—cannot be contained in an instant, since the moment is bound up with a network of meaning that extends to the memory of a shared past and anticipations of a future together. As Taylor himself emphasizes: “The deepest, most powerful kind of happiness, even in the moment, is plunged into a sense of meaning,” so that “when you look back on your life together, those happy moments, those travels in the sun, were bathed in the awareness of other years, other travels, which seemed to come alive in the present one.”30
In Taylor’s own account, the experience of love cannot be reduced to a simultaneous presence but opens onto a past and a future that exceed any given moment. Yet Taylor persistently conflates the desire to prolong our lives—to gather and preserve what we love—with a supposed desire for eternity. Consider the following passage, which symptomatically glosses the aspiration to live on as an aspiration for eternity:
All joy strives for eternity, because it loses some of its sense if it doesn’t last….Even just holding in memory is akin to keeping the time alive; even more if you can write about it, capture it in art. Art aspires to a certain kind of eternity, to be able to speak to future ages. But there are also other lesser modes or substitutes for eternity. One can make the eternal be the clan, the tribe, the society, the way of life. And your love, and the children who come from it, have their place in the chain; as long as you have preserved, or better enhanced, that tribe or way of life, you’ve handed it on. In that way, the meaning continues.
This just shows how joy strives for eternity, even if all that is available is a lesser form of it; and even if something is left out that matters to us highly individuated moderns, as the particular things that meant most to us are gradually lost in the general impact we’ve made. And of course, this eternity can’t preserve those who are really forgotten, or those who haven’t left their mark, or those who have been damned, excluded. There is no general resurrection in this “eternity” of grateful posterity.31
Taylor here assumes that when we strive to make something last we are striving for eternity. But that is a mistaken inference. When we strive to make something last we do not strive to make it eternal but to make it last for a longer time and in a qualitative sense: to make so
mething live on for the future—for persons, projects, and generations that matter to us—rather than for eternity. Through memory we can prolong precious periods of happiness, “keeping the time alive”; through artistic creation and the rearing of children we can make our legacy live on beyond our own death; through community with others, political commitments, and the care for a sustainable society we can extend a sense of purpose far beyond the duration of our own lives. These endeavors are not oriented toward eternity but express commitments to forms of living on, which have to reckon with their own finitude. Memories are fallible and eventually erased, artworks can fall into oblivion or wither away, and the very existence of future generations is never guaranteed.
Following from his notion of a religious desire for fullness, Taylor asserts that all these forms of living on are “lesser modes or substitutes for eternity.” When we passionately strive to “keep the time alive”—to sustain our lives or those of others—we supposedly seek an eternal life, for which temporal life is merely a “substitute.” Taylor thereby disregards that the desire for the continuation and flourishing of finite life does not entail a desire for eternity. If we seek to prolong our own life, the life of another, or the life of our society, we seek to transcend the limits of a particular time—to live on—but we do not seek to transcend the condition of time altogether. Far from fulfilling our desire to live on, eternity would deprive us of the life we want to maintain.
For the same reason, an eternal life cannot remedy the loss I mourn in the experience of your death, which Taylor highlights as the central problem in our secular age. Indeed, the religious notions of eternity that Taylor invokes as a supposed remedy (Buddhist nirvana and Christian eternal life) do not even pretend to offer the return of the beloved. Rather than supporting the attachment to a mortal beloved, the prerequisite for entering nirvana is the detachment from everything that is subject to loss. Similarly, the point of dwelling in heaven is not to adore and pursue one’s life with the earthly beloved, but to turn one’s adoration toward God. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as Jesus reminds us (Matt. 22:30).
Thus, the religious language of eternity—which according to Taylor should resonate with depth and reassurance at funerals—does not actually capture what we long for and express what we feel when we are in mourning. Taylor himself testifies to the difficulty of finding “a ceremony for death which will speak to our strongest feelings,” but he never considers that this may be due to the assumption that what we need is a religious ceremony. Certainly, the secular funerals that I have attended in recent years—painfully mourning the loss of loved ones—have not been marked by the embarrassment and awkwardness that Taylor ascribes to funeral ceremonies in the absence of religious faith. Rather, these funerals have provided a space for profoundly felt expressions of secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life—faith in the value of its past, faith in the importance of carrying it with us in the future—as well as devastation at the loss of this life.
V
Burying the dead can be seen as a fundamental form of secular faith. Through the act of burial—here understood as any form of honoring the deceased—we acknowledge both the irrevocable loss of a life and our continued fidelity to this life. We express our commitment to remembering and honoring the dead, avowing our responsibility for those who no longer exist. The dead can live on only in and through us: to the extent that we acknowledge them through our actions and as part of who we take ourselves to be. It is because the dead cannot be brought back to life—because they are irredeemably dead—that we are responsible for them. The very pain of loss can therefore be experienced as a form of fidelity in mourning. My love for you means that I ought to be utterly bereaved in the face of your death. This sense of responsibility is intelligible only from the standpoint of secular faith, since it is devoted to a life that is recognized as mortal and places demands on us precisely because it is mortal.
A religious faith in eternity cannot add anything to the dignity and pathos of mourning; it can only subtract from the mourning by diminishing the sense of loss. This is not to say that avowedly religious people do not mourn. But insofar as they do mourn, their mourning is animated by a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life rather than by a religious faith in eternity. If you truly believed in the existence of eternity—and in the superior value of eternal life—there would be no reason to mourn the loss of a finite life. Thus, Buddhism teaches that a fully enlightened person is beyond the pain of mourning and loss, having extinguished the desire to hold on to any life that is passing away. The same logic is articulated by the founding figures of Christianity. Saint Augustine forcefully argues against mourning the loss of mortal lives and upon the death of his mother—when he cannot hold back his tears—he condemns his weeping as an act of sin. Martin Luther in his turn declares, upon the death of his daughter Magdalena in 1542, that “I rejoice in the spirit, but sorrow in the flesh,” emphasizing to the congregation after her funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.”32
The one who takes his or her religious faith seriously will thus experience how it clashes with the secular faith that animates the experience of mourning. This is clear in the case of Luther. Despite declaring that the death of his daughter makes him rejoice in spirit, Luther movingly testifies to how “the flesh will not submit; parting grieves us beyond all measure.”33 Writing to his friend Justus Jonas, Luther confesses that although he and his wife should be grateful to God for Magdalena’s death, they are unable to feel such gratitude in their hearts:
I and my wife should joyfully give thanks for such a felicitous departure and blessed end by which Magdalena escaped the power of the flesh. Yet the force of our natural love is so great that we are unable to do this without crying and grieving in our hearts, or even without experiencing death ourselves. For the features, the words and the movements of the living and dying daughter remain deeply engraved in our hearts. Even the death of Christ…is unable to take this all away as it should.34
Luther here confesses his secular faith in the value of a finite, irreplaceable life: his living and dying daughter, her singular features, words, and movements, which continue to haunt him and his wife with a poignancy that the promise of eternal life cannot redeem. The force of their “natural love” is at odds with the force of religious faith and Luther himself records how the former is stronger than the latter. Three years later, writing to Andreas Osiander in 1545, Luther maintains that “it may appear strange, but I am still mourning the death…and I am not able to forget her. Yet I know surely that she is in heaven, that she has eternal life there.”35
The same conflict is rendered in greater depth and detail by Lewis in A Grief Observed, written in a secular age that allows even the devout believer more freedom to express his faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life. Precisely because Lewis is more expressive, the clash between the secular faith that animates mourning and the religious standpoint becomes all the more palpable. From the standpoint of his religious faith, Lewis makes clear that he has no reason to feel bereaved after the death of his wife. Rather, her death should recall him to the devotion to God, which has priority over the devotion to any mortal beloved:
There’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. Indeed, her death has ended the practical problem. While she was alive I could, in practice, have put her before God; that is, could have done what she wanted instead of what He wanted; if there’d been a conflict. What’s left is not a problem about anything I could do. It’s all about weights of feelings and motives and that sort of thing. It’s a problem I’m setting myself.36
Yet Lewis—like Luther—is not able to take this lesson to heart. While he professes to believe in the superior value of devoting oneself to God or merging with Him in mystical union, the “weights of feelings and motives” in A Grief
Observed continue to testify to his preference for being with his beloved. Indeed, the remarkable passages that outline such a preference—which I analyzed at the beginning—reverberate until the very end of the book, when Lewis recalls a conversation he had with Joy Davidman on her deathbed:
Once very near the end I said, “If you can—if it is allowed—come to me when I too am on my deathbed.” “Allowed!” she said. “Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.” She knew she was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed through her.37
Her will is the will to hold on to a mortal beloved, even in opposition to the supposed will of God or the harmony of heaven. This passionate commitment—this resistance to letting go—is also what animates Lewis’s mourning for her and his dedication to what they had together. From the perspective of such love, the source of suffering is not only the pain of separation but also the prospect that he could cease to suffer, that he could reach a state where he would no longer feel the pain of having lost her and the desire to have her back. “This fate,” writes Lewis in mourning, “would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life….Thus she would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.”38
Hence, it is all the more striking that the scene Lewis presents on the final page—as the religious resolution—marks the breaking of the will that binds him and his wife together. In direct contrast to the deathbed scene above, the last lines of the book celebrate her pious renunciation of the will to be with him: “She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.”39 The line that Lewis leaves in Italian—as the very last sentence of the book—is a quotation from the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso and reads in translation: “Then she turned toward the eternal fountain.” Dante’s beloved Beatrice, after having guided him in the ascent to heaven, here turns away from him toward the glory of God. Beatrice thus achieves the state of beatitude—the complete bliss of contemplating the radiance of God—which according to Dante is the ultimate fulfillment of desire. “As that light strikes us,” Dante emphasizes, we are transformed in such a way that “we cannot (this would be impossible) consent to turn and seek some other face.”40 Thus, even though Beatrice is the love of Dante’s life (and vice versa), the supposed fulfillment of their desire is a state of being in which they no longer even care to turn toward one another. There is no Dante in Beatrice’s beatitude and no Beatrice in Dante’s beatitude. By analogy, there is no C. S. Lewis for Joy Davidman in heaven and no Joy Davidman for C. S. Lewis. Even their own individual identities can no longer be said to exist, since they are unable to do anything except be absorbed by the radiance of God. This religious consummation does not fulfill the wishes that animated their love and their lives; it rather obliterates them, as they are literally lost in the rapture of God.41
This Life Page 7